To cut it short, Valve has laid off approx' 25 employees, some of which are big names in the industrys artwork such as;

Moby Francke, Half-Life 2 character designer and Team Fortress 2 art leadMatthew Russell, animator for Team Fortress 2 “Meet the” video seriesRealm Lovejoy, artist for Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. She was also part of the original DigiPen-turned-Valve team that created Narbacular Drop, the inspiration for Portal.

Some big names in their company who helped build many of the popular games we see from them like Half Life series, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

Do you think they've started to feel the sting of the financial market?

Trixxter wrote:Do you think they've started to feel the sting of the financial market?

Nope. Even though Valve are a private company and I have no access to their financials I would say with confidence that they are making more money than ever thanks to Steam and their popular game releases.

I think this has more to do with a company wide shift in regards to staff turn over. Gabe has been quoted several times over the past 12 months about wanting to get tougher on firing people and letting people go when things aren't working out for the company. It simply looks like they've finally started putting their money where their mouth is.

Valve head Gabe Newell says the company isn't stopping any planned hardware initiatives, despite reports of layoffs at the company and the news that hardware lead Jeri Ellsworth was fired. In a statement issued to Engadget, Newell said:

"We don't usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I'd take the unusual step of addressing them. No, we aren't canceling any projects. No, we aren't changing any priorities or projects we've been discussing. No, this isn't about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We're not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn't working here."

Well, after 9 years of helping build the SourceFilmmaker, working on animated short films, games, comics, characters and hats for Valve's franchises, it's time for me to start making some new worlds of my own.

End of an era for me, but what a ride.

The people that left might even be starting up their own small dev team. Valve certainly aren't running out of money, although they are outsourcing more than they used to( like CS:GO) but so are most companies.

exe3 wrote:So many artists gone? Maybe they don't need em anymore ala maybe they're not making games anymore. Or at least nothing in their existing franchises.

LOL, jumping to conclusions much

They lose 25 staff from 400+ and all of a sudden they are not making games any more.

By the way they are currently making DOTA 2 and TF2 updates as well as at least one other project (Ricochet 2).

Well the article implied they just kicked out very key people for the visual style of some of their major games. What are they gonna do? Release HL3 with a completely different visual style despite HL2's widely acclaimed and unique visual style? I jumped out there specifically because this occurrence was so random and seemingly so damning of the visual styles for their current games (specifically HL2).

Who knows, maybe these guys weren't actually that relevant hence them getting fired and the visuals for HL3 or what not won't change or anything. I don't know. The article seemed to imply otherwise.

*Insert negative stuff here.*

"..hiding your [story] beneath endless layers of confusion doesn’t make you an artist, it just makes people think you are."- Gameshadow

Just because they fired a lead artist doesn't mean they can't create HL3 with the same art style as HL2. They are artists, it's their job. It's not like this one guy magically locked down the half life art style to his person.

The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.

Exactly Matty. It's incredibly common for artists to practice making models/textures/environments/characters in a specific style, especially if they are looking to work for the studio that uses such a style.

Matty wrote:Just because they fired a lead artist doesn't mean they can't create HL3 with the same art style as HL2. They are artists, it's their job. It's not like this one guy magically locked down the half life art style to his person.

exe3 wrote:Well the article implied they just kicked out very key people for the visual style of some of their major games. What are they gonna do? Release HL3 with a completely different visual style despite HL2's widely acclaimed and unique visual style?